Chris

Airwindows is one guy: me! I am an audio hacker and computer programmer from way back. I seek only to continue my life up here in Vermont, inventing things and putting them onto the internet, sometimes for free and sometimes for pay. My hope is that people richer than me (i.e. most people) don't rob me. My other hope is for another cup of Aeropress. One out of two ain't bad!

It’s always nice to expand one’s horizons! You don’t have to run the latest Logic to be able to use any plugin in mid/side mode… though you might need to do a little fiddling with settings.

EdIsDim comes in two plugs: first use MidSide to convert your stereo track into mid/side (on left and right channels). Then apply your processing (there’s a control with which you can balance the mid/side balance, which also means you can gain stage the M/S content into your plugin), then, go into EdIsDim (read it backwards) to convert back to stereo. The same control is present, and can reverse the gain staging you applied.

Some good techniques include using it with Density to saturate the center and leave the stereo width lively, or getting a fresh take on a stereo reverb that’s much wider than usual. But the real purpose is opening up funky routing techniques in your DAW: send the L and R to separate busses, do all manner of things with plugins that don’t even have to be the same, or to line up (sample delay on just mid or side, anyone?) and merge them back to a stereo buss with EdIsDim on it. Or design weird synth patches that are heavy on the left with a lot of odd stereo behaviors, just to run into EdIsDim as an intentional part of the synth sound. Sky’s the limit :)

People have sometimes wanted to be informed when I come out with a new thing. Therefore, I’ve come up with some new ways for you to hear about what I do. Obviously, the primary one is to follow my website, airwindows.com.

The other primary one is to follow my Patreon, though I’ve actually chosen to make posts there only when I have something unusual that doesn’t count as a plugin. A how-to, a game, a hack: stuff like that. Those things will appear on YouTube and Patreon and the website, not on plugin sites.

You might not know that the little yellow ‘broadcast’ button on the right sidebar of the website is an RSS feed! That still works and is a way to subscribe to my updates.

The link that says “download a zip of all the AU/VSTs, here” is a link to a zip file with all the VST-enabled free plugins, to download all at once! I nearly always remember to update that right away, and it should have the latest plugins. It’s also got a list (from new to old) of all the plugin names, with their TL:DW;s. If you’re trying to remember what does what, that might come in handy.

My new things also get mentions on Twitter, though I’m not super chatty there.

The Airwindows Plugins page on Facebook now gets autoposts: it used to not get anything, but it seemed like an OK idea. Bear in mind with that, you’re at the mercy of Facebook deciding that since I don’t pay them to promote posts, they could refuse to let my fans see my stuff in their timeline. It might not happen, or it might already be happening; be warned, but posts do go up there.

The same holds for the Airwindows Youtube channel: obviously I make lots of videos and they go up there, but if you only subscribe to the channel Youtube may still decide not to show you new things I make. They have less excuse, as I go to some trouble to act like I want to earn money their way (please run adblockers there, I don’t really want that as a revenue stream as it’s very unsafe and untrustworthy), but you must still both subscribe and go to the little ‘gear’ symbol they have, and specify that you want to hear about every new thing on my channel. Otherwise they will begin throwing stuff away without asking you, even though you’re a subscriber. It’s a YouTube thing. I’ll try to keep up on all these gotchas as they relate just as much to my plugin users and all those who are trying to find their way in this our world of the future.

Speaking of the future, there’s the Airwindows GitHub account. As I write this, it’s just got the code for the video game ‘Counterpart’ up there, but if you dig you’ll find special audio code I wrote to produce a deep, bassy, subsonic rumble. That’s the same code that was in ‘Voice Of The Starship’, a truly innovative procedural spaceship noise generator, and it can be stuck in other games and used to produce anything from thunder to rain or wind sounds. More importantly, the Airwindows Github will contain all the source code I’ve got, including the template files I build plugins out of. They might seem cumbersome and hacky, but I’ve never been able to master XCode templates and they serve my purposes. It’s not really for people to help write my plugins for me (though I would love to see working reliable sidechain plugin code! But it has to work for both AU and VST), it’s to help other people start writing the plugins they need. I’m going to go with MIT licensing just to double down on the ‘into thy hands I commend my spirit’ thing, of not using technological or legal means to push people around, and trusting them to do OK by me. In some ways this has served me well.

Lastly, posts here echo to the Airwindows subreddit, purely as a convenience in case anyone craves reading about the latest Airwindows stuff on Reddit. If I post anything to my soundcloud, that’ll also echo there. It’s a curious place, but fun :)

If anyone needs other ways to be alerted of my latest work, let me know and I may be able to incorporate it. I’ve managed to include quite a few places, as you can see :)